O
Oleksii
Guest
Hi everyone!
I want to briefly share what it took to develop my Shipaton project. I won't load you with too much technical stuff; I'm sure there will be plenty of AI-written articles full of tech details. Let me say right away that I'm really glad I took part. Before this, I had never brought any of my projects to a release, and Shipaton gave me the motivation I was missing. Since I also have a full-time job, I worked on the project mostly in the evenings, at night, and on weekends. I got so worn out that I stopped remembering what day of the week it was, but it was worth it.
In short, what the Rattitude Care app is for: keeping track of your rats, their weight and health, plus an AI assistant. Why people need it is probably not that interesting to you, but I have rats myself, so trust me, it's needed
I heard about Shipaton at the end of July while I was on vacation, on a road trip across Canada, sitting in a restaurant and scrolling my LinkedIn feed. From that moment I knew I want to take part, but first I had to get back home. When I got back at the beginning of August, I started working hard and thought it would be nice to also join BuildInPublic. Honestly, that was one of the most important decisions, because in the end I got my first users without any advertising. I don't really do social media and I don't like doing it, but my Instagram page got 1.7K followers in just one month. Honestly, I was shocked.
From the results of a survey I found out that people were waiting for iOS more than Android. I'm actually a Xamarin (.NET MAUI) developer, and cross-platform is my main skill, but I've also written apps in Kotlin and Swift, and I like native, so I started this project with plain Kotlin Compose. In the end I decided to move all the logic out and use KMP. Since a lot had already been written purely for Android, I didn't want to accidentally break something there by moving to Compose Multiplatform, so I chose to write the UI twice. It was safer for the Android release. As fast as I could, I started the 14-day closed testing on Android, and in the meantime I switched to iOS.
The hardest part of this migration turned out to be porting my mascot's animations from Android Canvas to iOS. Just asking some model to do it for me from scratch didn't work. They burned a million tokens and the result wasn't even close to what I needed. No matter how I prompted, it was all for nothing. So I decided to come at it from another side and first built a separate skill for the agent that explained how this kind of problem can be solved in general. And guess what? With this skill, even a Sonnet model or Gemini Flash could give me an identical animation on iOS in a minute, while before that not a single model could give me anything sensible even in half an hour.
In the age of AI, when you can automate anything and could ask for UI tests in a couple of prompts, the biggest benefit I got was from manual testing. Thanks to my wife, who tested every screen for several days and gave me feedback. It was exactly this testing that made me move a lot of settings into remote config. No automated testing would have shown me that, and my first release would have gone out clunky and not configurable. When I realized I'd have to make a new build for her every time, I understood I needed a quick way to control this without new releases. Thank God Firebase Remote Config exists
Anyway, please don't fire testers because of AI, and value manual testing. After all, in the end it's people who will be using the product.
Surprisingly, the Android release went really fast: less than a day passed from the moment I pressed Apply for Production to the moment the app was available to everyone. But iOS was a total disaster for me
First, 2 days after submitting, they asked me for additional info. Then 3 days later it turned out the ATT dialog showed up too late and had to appear right when the app is opened for the first time, so I had to make the changes quickly in the middle of the night, because I knew every hour counted. And only 4 days after that I got the long-awaited approval, just a few days before the end of Shipaton. Honestly, I almost lost my mind while waiting) In the end, the iOS review took 9 days.
Not everything went the way I planned. I wanted to release the app on the Samsung Galaxy Store too, and I even already did the optimization for foldables. But then it turned out I don't have a DUNS number, so I have to postpone the Galaxy Store release for a month, until I get the number.
I also couldn't register a merchant account in Google because of restrictions, so for now the Android version is left without subscriptions. But I'm not giving up, I just need more time.
I don't know if I'll win anything, but for myself I've already won an incredible experience, a published app, first users, and even a couple of cents in AdMob
Thanks for reading, I hope the story turned out interesting for you.
A little project description below, in case it helps someone find my app through this article in the future:
The app is made for rat owners who want to keep their rats' health in one place.
What you can do in the app:
Try Rattitude on:
I want to briefly share what it took to develop my Shipaton project. I won't load you with too much technical stuff; I'm sure there will be plenty of AI-written articles full of tech details. Let me say right away that I'm really glad I took part. Before this, I had never brought any of my projects to a release, and Shipaton gave me the motivation I was missing. Since I also have a full-time job, I worked on the project mostly in the evenings, at night, and on weekends. I got so worn out that I stopped remembering what day of the week it was, but it was worth it.
In short, what the Rattitude Care app is for: keeping track of your rats, their weight and health, plus an AI assistant. Why people need it is probably not that interesting to you, but I have rats myself, so trust me, it's needed
How it started
I heard about Shipaton at the end of July while I was on vacation, on a road trip across Canada, sitting in a restaurant and scrolling my LinkedIn feed. From that moment I knew I want to take part, but first I had to get back home. When I got back at the beginning of August, I started working hard and thought it would be nice to also join BuildInPublic. Honestly, that was one of the most important decisions, because in the end I got my first users without any advertising. I don't really do social media and I don't like doing it, but my Instagram page got 1.7K followers in just one month. Honestly, I was shocked.
Cross-platform
From the results of a survey I found out that people were waiting for iOS more than Android. I'm actually a Xamarin (.NET MAUI) developer, and cross-platform is my main skill, but I've also written apps in Kotlin and Swift, and I like native, so I started this project with plain Kotlin Compose. In the end I decided to move all the logic out and use KMP. Since a lot had already been written purely for Android, I didn't want to accidentally break something there by moving to Compose Multiplatform, so I chose to write the UI twice. It was safer for the Android release. As fast as I could, I started the 14-day closed testing on Android, and in the meantime I switched to iOS.
The hardest part of this migration turned out to be porting my mascot's animations from Android Canvas to iOS. Just asking some model to do it for me from scratch didn't work. They burned a million tokens and the result wasn't even close to what I needed. No matter how I prompted, it was all for nothing. So I decided to come at it from another side and first built a separate skill for the agent that explained how this kind of problem can be solved in general. And guess what? With this skill, even a Sonnet model or Gemini Flash could give me an identical animation on iOS in a minute, while before that not a single model could give me anything sensible even in half an hour.
Testing
In the age of AI, when you can automate anything and could ask for UI tests in a couple of prompts, the biggest benefit I got was from manual testing. Thanks to my wife, who tested every screen for several days and gave me feedback. It was exactly this testing that made me move a lot of settings into remote config. No automated testing would have shown me that, and my first release would have gone out clunky and not configurable. When I realized I'd have to make a new build for her every time, I understood I needed a quick way to control this without new releases. Thank God Firebase Remote Config exists
Anyway, please don't fire testers because of AI, and value manual testing. After all, in the end it's people who will be using the product.Release
Surprisingly, the Android release went really fast: less than a day passed from the moment I pressed Apply for Production to the moment the app was available to everyone. But iOS was a total disaster for me
First, 2 days after submitting, they asked me for additional info. Then 3 days later it turned out the ATT dialog showed up too late and had to appear right when the app is opened for the first time, so I had to make the changes quickly in the middle of the night, because I knew every hour counted. And only 4 days after that I got the long-awaited approval, just a few days before the end of Shipaton. Honestly, I almost lost my mind while waiting) In the end, the iOS review took 9 days.Fails
Not everything went the way I planned. I wanted to release the app on the Samsung Galaxy Store too, and I even already did the optimization for foldables. But then it turned out I don't have a DUNS number, so I have to postpone the Galaxy Store release for a month, until I get the number.
I also couldn't register a merchant account in Google because of restrictions, so for now the Android version is left without subscriptions. But I'm not giving up, I just need more time.
My Final Thoughts
I don't know if I'll win anything, but for myself I've already won an incredible experience, a published app, first users, and even a couple of cents in AdMob
Thanks for reading, I hope the story turned out interesting for you.A little project description below, in case it helps someone find my app through this article in the future:
The app is made for rat owners who want to keep their rats' health in one place.
What you can do in the app:
- Keep your rats and cages organized, and plan introductions of new rats step by step
- Track each rat's weight on a chart and notice weight loss early
- Get reminders for every medication dose during a treatment course
- Check which foods are safe for rats and which are toxic
- Calculate how many rats fit in your cage
- Ask Bulochka, an AI assistant, any rat-care question
Try Rattitude on:
The App Store
Google Play
The Website with free rat-care guides